


Jimmy’s Daughter Will Not Look Down

by lily22 (segfault)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Also the opposite of faith, Family, Gen, Having Faith, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-26
Updated: 2018-10-26
Packaged: 2019-08-07 19:07:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16414190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/segfault/pseuds/lily22
Summary: Claire Novak has never asked anything of the angel walking around in her father’s body. Not for ten whole years.





	Jimmy’s Daughter Will Not Look Down

**Author's Note:**

> originally posted to LJ, 2010/09/07.

It’s like this.   
  
She’s in the passenger seat on a bright, hot Sunday afternoon. Mom is a careful driver, eyes fixed on the road, hands at ten and two o’clock. It’s easy to feel the rest of the world drowned out with the car rumbling in her ear, the sunlight reaching through the windshield to cradle her in its palm, but there’s a part of her aware that Daddy’s in the back seat, either sleeping or resting his eyes, and something about that is worrying.   
  
“Don’t disturb your father, Claire,” says Mom, when she makes to turn around.  
  
“But what’s wrong with him?”  
  
“He’s just come back from a long trip, and he’s tired, so tired. Let him rest.”  
  
“Then shouldn’t we stop for a while?”   
  
This time Mom reaches over and holds her head still. “Don’t look, Claire. You know you can’t look.”  
  
Her eyes are straight ahead, but in the rear-view mirror the back seat is empty. When she pries her mom’s hand away and turns, she sees there’s nobody there.  
  
  
  
  
No, it’s like this.   
  
She’s lying with her head in her mother’s lap. It’s a long time ago, long enough that she still fits lengthwise across the back of the car, but she curls up her legs anyway, because it feels safer. Daddy’s up front, talking on the phone, voice low and deep, words indistinct. All around her the metal frame of the car rattles and shakes, and the engine is an unfamiliar growl somewhere beneath her ear. On the door by her feet is a little toy soldier, crammed shoulders-deep into the ashtray, and the lid doesn’t quite shut over its plastic green helmet.  
  
“Mom,” she squirms. “Can you make Daddy drive slower? My head hurts.” The car rattles and rattles. Mom places a cool hand on her shoulder, but it’s nothing to the cold finger that suddenly touches along her spine, slipping between her shoulders all the way down to the base. “Mom?”  
  
She knows she shouldn’t look, but she sits up anyway. It’s the Winchesters in the front seat. Dean is driving, but she knows he could meet her gaze if he wasn’t ashamed to. Sam gives her a sad smile. He says something meaningless, and she realizes it’s his voice she’s mistaken for her father’s. She’s already forgotten what he sounded like. It was nothing like Sam.  
  
  
  
  
In the end, Claire calls Dean, stepping out into the hallway with an old scrap of paper and a tight knot in her throat. Sam would be kind, but she thinks that Dean would be honest.   
  
“Hello?” she blurts, when he picks up on the second ring. It’s too soon, she still hasn’t thought of what to say. “It’s Claire Novak, I don’t know if you… Do you still talk to Castiel?”  
  
Dean is silent too long. Claire wonders if there’s someone else at the other end, if it’s his brother still, or a different kind of family. Dean ten years older would be an adult now, maybe settled, maybe with a little girl of his own.   
  
“It’s… it’s my mom,” Claire hurries on, before the silence can turn into a dial tone. They’d left their numbers, but she’s never used them, and maybe they weren’t supposed to be used, not really. “She’s… There’s been a… It might be her last chance, to see him. My dad,” she adds, less to clarify than to stake a claim. “Jimmy Novak.”  
  
“Fuck,” says Dean. “I’m sorry.” And then he’s silent again.  
  
“So if you could—” Claire begins. She’s not sure what she pictures: Dean leaning over to Castiel across some booth in some diner, or Dean etching symbols across the ground in blood. Whatever works.  
  
“Wish I could help,” says Dean at the same time, “but I don’t see much of Cas anymore. Upstairs put out this recall on angels a while back. Safety hazard for ages 0 and up, kind of thing. Do not expose to your Apocalypse.”  
  
“Well you must—how do you get in touch with him, then?”  
  
Dean chuckles or coughs, it doesn’t come through clearly on the phone. “Yeah, usually Cas does the getting in touch. Pops up in dreams like nobody’s business.”   
  
Frustration takes her: “But if you really needed him…”  
  
“If it’s total break the glass, swing the hatchet emergency, you mean?” He lowers his voice, as though he might be embarrassed to admit it. “Hey, praying works.”  
  
  
  
  
She’s back in the car, strapped in tight in shotgun. With the way Mom drives these days, she’s never needed to be told to buckle up. Their car is restless in its lane, cutting in and out of traffic like some sort of dare. And yet Mom never trusts her with the keys, like she might take the car and leave one day, like it’s in her blood to disappear. So she goes to the community college not fifteen minutes away, she always checks in if she’s going to be late, and her driver’s license lies two years expired in her wallet, because she’s never gotten around to renewing it.  
  
And she keeps an eye out when her mother is driving. That’s why she sees the truck first; it’s garish yellow with blocky green lettering, and she remembers that this already happened, she knows how this will go. She watches it lumber around the bend just as Mom goes to make that last pass, and the bright logo splashed across the side of it fills up the whole windshield, a grinning vacuum sucking up cartoony mice and roaches the last thing she sees before she realizes she should be screaming.   
  
Through the blaring horns and the stench of hot rubber, she senses that they aren’t alone in the hurtling car. There’s someone behind her, a seat-back away, and that doesn’t seem right.   
  
“You weren’t here for this,” she gasps, too scared and confused to make it an accusation.  
  
“No,” says her daddy. “Not for this.”  
  
  
  
  
When Claire wakes up, her back is sore from the hospital chair, and there’s a strange man standing at the foot of her mother’s bed, still as marble and ethereal where the afternoon sunlight bleaches him white around the edges. He’s wearing Jimmy’s trench coat still, amazingly; she recognizes her father’s face, but she’s not sure if she would have picked him out in a crowd of faces, not without her father’s tie hanging loose beneath it.   
  
“Your mother is well,” says the angel, with a sorrowful expression that doesn’t quite match his tidings. “We do keep our promises.”  
  
“What about—”   
  
Castiel looks back over Amelia in the bed, the woman that his vessel loved swathed nearly anonymous in dressings and plaster. When they peel away the bandages, they’ll find the skin whole underneath, the flesh untorn, the burns all disappeared. The cast will come off her leg and hip and she’ll walk in a day, not a year. But the angel is impassive, and she remembers to this day how bright he burned in his true form, how cold, vivid even after her father’s voice has escaped her.   
  
“Jimmy has rendered an unutterable service unto heaven,” Castiel tells her. He doesn’t so much walk over as he appears in the chair beside her. “This whole family has given much. I would have him told…”   
  
But he doesn’t finish his sentence. Instead he lays his head down on her shoulder, impersonally as he might set down a book he’s finished reading. Claire’s frozen up completely, and when there’s a terrible blaze of light at the edge of her vision, whiter than the hospital walls, whiter than thunder, she doesn’t look, only stares straight ahead.   
  
With the rustle of many wings, the angel departs. The warmth against her shoulder remains.  
  
  
  
  
Jimmy doesn’t fall to pieces as they might have expected, either with joy or insanity. Instead he does his best for his family, taking charge of the baffled doctors, holding his wife’s hand, drawing wards on the walls and windows and swiping salt shakers from the cafeteria downstairs. He’s more serious than Claire remembers, but maybe she remembers wrong, and if he doesn’t smile as much as he should, they find it a small crime to forgive. Unlike the angel, who didn’t seem to realize that there was anything missing, Jimmy just forgets sometimes that other people can see him.  
  
They leave the hospital the next day, and though a nervous Amelia fiddles obviously with the keys of her new rental, Jimmy doesn’t seem to notice. (Claire reaches out to take them, but Amelia shakes her head.) Jimmy clambers into the back seat, chattering obliviously about the places he’s seen, naming cities that they’d be hard pressed to poke a pin through on a map, pausing every now and then in his narrative to erase angels and demons from the scenery, as though his family still need to be sheltered.   
  
He’s weaving a story about the things to be found in Jerusalem, in cool stone cellars only half a man deep, when Amelia interrupts with a string of curses and slams on the brakes. A blue SUV cuts them off, Claire has flashbacks, and the whole car swerves wildly before hiccuping itself back onto a straight path.   
  
Amelia’s trembling as she coasts to the next red light. “Look at us,” she laughs shakily, putting a hand over her eyes. “Look how bad we need you, Jimmy. I can’t even handle traffic.”  
  
Jimmy, loudly mouthing off ridiculous gas-guzzlers and their idiotic drivers, falls silent at that. The car starts up again, but he spends the rest of the ride staring out the window, eyes scanning the tops of buildings, the glimpses of sky.  
  
  
  
  
Claire hears her father’s voice before she finds him. She’s starting to learn it again, but mostly she knows where they left him, standing over a cutting board with a knife and a bowl of bell peppers. Hopefully he remembers how they go together.  
  
“So I guess I have to thank you,” he is saying, probably not to the peppers, “for watching over Ames and Claire, and for not having our neighbors be all demony this time around. I just get this feeling, though, like… like you’re not quite done with me yet. Are you? Because if you even think you’re going to come back one day, going to walk in someone’s flesh, it might as well be me. It might as well be now.”  
  
Claire steadies her horror, keeps it under wrap long enough to look through into the kitchen. Her father is at the table, hands clasped, eyes shut. Once upon a time he’d been helping her with her math homework at that table, fishing out individual fruit loops from her milk because she didn’t like the purple ones.   
  
“I know angels. Man, I wish I didn’t, but you think everyone else is as timeless as you, and then you blink and I’m bent over my walker and what’re you going to do then, huh? You can’t have Claire, that’s our deal. Not her children, or her children’s children, or—”  
  
The peppers are still in their bowl, bright reds and greens and yellows beaded over with moisture. There’s only one on the cutting board, half sliced and forgotten that way, small seeds dotting the blade of the knife.  
  
“So, you know. If that’s what it takes, if I have to carry you forever, never aging, never getting out of this stupid trench coat, then it’s a yes. You knew it had to be yes, didn’t you? That’s why you let me go? Then yes, you bastard, as many times as it takes. Yes, yes, yes—”  
  
Claire turns away from the sight, leans hard against the wall. Her breathing comes out ragged. She knows what she must do.   
  
When she strides in through the doorway, she has no expression on her face, nothing in her mind but the memory of something painfully bright burning in her skull.   
  
“I would speak with you.”  
  
“Claire?” Jimmy looks up, puzzled.  
  
“No,” denies her voice. She stares straight into her father’s eyes, scrutinizing, the way Castiel in her father once stared at her,  _through her_ , and saw nothing. “Jimmy, I’ve come to tell you that you’ve rendered a great service to heaven. No angel could ask a single thing more of you—”  
  
And he understands. His face folds up with the weight of it, and his arms fold around her, lightly as though she were still the child he left behind. “Claire,” he murmurs into her hair, and the illusion is shattered, she crumples against him limp and weeping. “That’s enough, my beautiful girl. That’s more than enough.”  
  
  
  
  
Jimmy manages to make dinner after all this: glistening ribs, green salad tossed with the peppers that Claire finished cutting, and pie from Dave’s Supermarket, reheated in the oven. He lays it out proudly on the table, and then holds out his hands. “May I say grace?”   
  
Amelia breathes in sharply. Claire’s fork wavers over her plate, but she reluctantly sets it back down. She doesn’t have to look to know that her mother’s hands are fists in her lap.  
  
“Ames.  _Please_.” Jimmy is such a young man, face as smooth as Amelia’s is lined. His body hasn’t aged a day, but his eyes are centuries old. He holds out his hands again.  
  
Claire accepts first, then her mother. Jimmy bows his head, relieved, and then doesn’t seem to know what to say. “Father,” he murmurs eventually, “though the road ahead is long, we pray that you would grant us grace in equal measure with our trials, that you would never place more burdens upon our shoulders than give us strength to carry them.”  
  
Here he stops. The moment drags on, and Claire stares fixedly into her place setting. Across the table, Amelia is doing the same. Jimmy seems to be struggling with himself, but when Claire squeezes his hand tentatively, he starts and manages to choke out one last “Amen.”   
  
“Amen,” they echo dutifully. He doesn’t release their hands.  
  
  
  
  
They swallow up the road in gulps, their car alone on the asphalt, trees rushing by on their left, a mountain to their right that sprawls blue-green across the horizon and doesn’t so much move as turn to watch them go by.   
  
She knows she shouldn’t look, but when she does there are two identical men in the front of the car, facing out onto the road. She can’t tell from the back which one is her father, and she pushes herself between the seats, craning her head forward. The one in the passenger seat is slumped against the window, his eyes closed, his mouth soft with sleep. The one driving spares her a glance, and his face is featureless, washed in light.   
  
Gently, he pries the steering wheel from the dashboard, and turns to press it into her hands. She stares down at the car logo, just for a second, the airbag warning, the small horn grooved into the leather.   
  
When she looks up, the car is still moving, but the both of them are gone.


End file.
